Scottish Gaelic: dismal perspectives

When compared with other Celtic languages, the Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) is on a disadvantaged position. While the Irish language is an official language of a country and the Welsh share the role of administrative and legal language with English, the Scottish is acknowledge only as an autochthonous minority language (the definition comes from a Europe Union Treaty).

It is not as strange as it may look like. The central and southern regions of the nation (the center of the political and economic power) were anglicized already during the Norman invasions by the Saxon courts who fled of the conquerors (cf. Bailey, R. “The Conquest of English” in Greenbaum, S. The English Language Today. Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English, 1985). The Scottish Lowlands became culturally English, utterly forsaken the celtic roots, that were banished to the northern Highlands.

Nowadays, there are little more than 50 thousand native speakers of Gaelic and less than 100 thousand speakers with any degree of ability in the language (at 2001 census, cf. General Registers Office's Gaelic Report). The Gaelic is spoken by less than 2% of Scottish population. But the Scottish Gaelic is not necessarily a language doomed to extinction. There are revival measures taking place at this moment.

In the politic front, the SNP (Scottish National Party), the current majority in the Scottish Parliament aproved the Gaelic Language Act, that orders the creation of a “Language Board”, i.e. a language authority in the model of the Welsh Language Board. (Still, the Scottish is not yet mandatory even for public administration).

Crest of the Scottish Parliament and logo of the Scottish National Party.

(Source: respective websites)

In the cultural front, Scotland is living a retaking of fictional prose written in Gaelic. An example is the Ùr-Sgeul project (about this project, see the article Challenge and opportunity for Gaelic prose in the twenty-firstcentury, by John Storey, 2009).

Some efforts are less organized and systematic, but, because of that, more dynamic. One of these cases is the use of quite old-fashioned technology to keep contact between Scots inside and outside the British Islands: the usenet group Scottish Culture. The article Online, Offline and Beyond (hays, 2008) explains how the interaction through this group helps Scottish-Canadians to build a Scottish imaginary and a Scottish identity.

Although, as relevant as these efforts may be, the survival of a minority language relies heavily on the weight of Institutions (Smith, 2003), the formal education above them all.  The law researcher Rhona K. M. Smith shows in her paper Mother Tongue Education and the Law (op. cit) an overview of the legal shelter offered to Gaelic by Scotland, United Kingdom and Europe Union. The commonest access to Gaelic learning is as a “foreign language”, i.e. it is one of the options of mandatory second language in some schools (along with languages such as French, German and Spanish). Smith, though, recommends full bilingual education for both children whose native language is Gaelic and children whose native language is English. A hardly plausible goal, due to resource difficulties (it would demand huge investments and there are few teachers able to teach in Gaelic) and also because many Scots probably do not think they owe any allegiance to Gaelic.

NOTE: Some of the articles mentioned here deal also with a language called “Scotis”. This is a language related to English, i. e., a non-Celtic language and not approached here because of that.

EXTRA MATERIAL

- Scene from the movie Trainspotting question Scottish Nationalism associated with the rite of visiting the Mountains of the Highlands.
- "An Eala Bhàn" or "The White Swan", Gaelic song by Julie Fowlis